Will Hillary Clinton Embrace Social Security Expansion?

The Senate Democratic caucus united behind Elizabeth Warren last month to support an amendment that would expand Social Security benefits. Everybody from Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist, to Joe Manchin, one of the caucus's most conservative members, backed the measure.

It was a non-binding budget amendment and it failed, but many progressives quickly sought to parlay it into something more meaningful, evidence of "tremendous momentum" for expanding Social Security benefits within the party. They had an audience of one in mind: Hillary Clinton.

It will be easy enough for Clinton to attack Republicans and run against cutting benefits or privatizing Social Security. But the real choice will be whether to go even further and embrace expansion as Senate Democrats overwhelmingly did last month.

If they can't have Warren run for the White House, the left wants to shape the Clinton candidacy in the Massachusetts senator's image. Expanding Social Security will be one metric to measure that endeavor.

"For too long in Washington, Social Security has been under assault. Republicans have long argued that we have to gut the program to save it. Well, they are wrong," Warren said on the Senate floor the night of the budget vote. "We should be talking about expanding Social Security."

Clinton is going to have ample opportunity to talk about the retirement program. On the left, two possible primary contenders are in favor of expanding Social Security. Sanders introduced a bill this year to increase benefits by about $65 a month. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley endorsed the idea in an interview with The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, at least two top Republican contenders are heading in the other direction.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has proposed cuts to Social Security ahead of an expected 2016 campaign, and announced candidate Sen. Ted Cruz said he would support partial privatization.

"This is a conversation Washington politicians don't have because they do not believe the American people have the appetite for hard truths. Once again, they underestimate the people they serve," Christie said this week. "Americans not only deserve fairness, they deserve the honesty of their leaders."

The polls on expanding Social Security can be read both ways. As Mother Jones noted, polling last year from Lake Research Partners found that 79 percent of Americans support the idea. Multiple Democrats noted that many seniors live almost entirely on their Social Security checks, $1,100 a month or about $13,000 a year.

The flip side, though, is that Americans over 65, for whom Social Security is most likely to be a top issue, went for Mitt Romney by more than 10 points in 2012. Clinton's messaging thus far has focused on expanding economic opportunities for the next generation, an age group where Democrats tend to have more political success.

Sen. Brian Schatz, who co-sponsored the amendment with Warren, said he wasn't sure expanding the program's benefits would actually be a part of the Democrats' or Clinton's 2016 platform, but insisted that the political tenor has shifted away from thoughts of cutting the program.

"I think what we've done is put a spring in the step of people who advocate for Social Security," the Hawaii Democrat said about the amendment vote in an interview. "Now whether we will get in this cycle to expansion, it's an unknowable answer. But I think at least we've gotten to the point where entertaining cuts as some sort of adult behavior, encouraged by people who are not in touch with Americans who depend on Social Security," is an idea that is losing favor, "if not quite off the table."

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, one of Social Security expansion's leading advocates in the Democratic Party, who co-sponsored a bill last Congress to increase benefits by about $70 a month, said he wasn't yet thinking about the 2016 platform. He focused instead on the other side of the aisle, where Republicans argue that the program is on an unsustainable financial path and generally propose spending cuts to address it.

"I don't know about the politics of it. Forget the politics, I don't think about 2016 yet," Brown said. "Republicans want to talk about Social Security as a budget issue. It's not about that. It's about retirement security. People's savings are declining. People's wages are stagnant."

Other Senate Democrats also demurred, despite their support for the Warren amendment. Several had to be reminded that the measure had, in fact, been voted on.

The "primary objective" should be preserving the program as it currently exists, said Sen. Ben Cardin, though he said he was receptive to fixing "inequities in the system."

Sen. Robert Casey said he was open to expanding benefits, but that the priority should be protecting the program from Republican attacks. "I think it should be part of what we do," Casey said, "but the biggest challenge we have frankly around here is preventing people from dismantling or undermining Social Security."

That is the temperature among top Democrats who recently voted for the measure to expand Social Security benefits, which raises the question of where exactly the pressure on Clinton to go big would come from. She isn't expected to release detailed policy proposals until next month, after she has done a series of smaller campaign events, and her campaign did not specify her stance on Social Security expansion.

"As the campaign ramps up, she will have a lot to say about strengthening retirement security," Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement. "Hillary has a record of fighting against privatizing Social Security and opposing cuts to seniors benefits and, as she said yesterday, dealing with challenges facing older Americans is a top priority for her."

Coming around to expansion would be a pretty significant shift for Clinton. In 2008, she supported setting up a commission to address Social Security's solvency and opposed a proposal from then-Sen. Barack Obama to lift the cap on the payroll tax that pays for the program, which in 2015 earnings over about $118,500 are not subjected to.

But if Clinton isn't going to go all the way to expanding Social Security, there has been a pretty big hint that she might at least consider bending on the latter issue and support taxing wealthier Americans to make the program more solvent, which would likely find support in the Warren wing of the party.

The Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank in Washington founded by Clinton's now-campaign chairman John Podesta, released a report this year citing income inequality as a leading cause of Social Security's long-term insolvency. The program is projected to be unable to pay full benefits starting in 2033. Part of the problem is that more income has accumulated above the payroll-tax threshold as income inequality has increased, the report found.

One of the implied remedies, then, would be taxing some income above the current cap. Sanders's bill would tax income above $250,000 to fund the program. Social Security's chief actuary estimated that would prolong the program's solvency until 2065 while the bill also increased benefits.

In the age of income-inequality politics and a Warren-influenced Democratic base, that might sound more palatable to Clinton this time around. But details are still to come.